It’s been one month now since local students and their teachers were in a classroom together, and one Newmarket educator decided to rally school staff to let the kids know just how much they are missed.
Denne Public School teacher Geoff Brown, who teaches a split grades 7 and 8 homeroom class, said he was inspired to create a slideshow with the theme of showing students and their families that they were missed after hearing about similar projects at York Region schools.
“It’s just something that, as a staff, we wanted to put together because we really miss the kids,” said Brown, who has been at the Burford Street school for nearly 20 years. “I would never want to teach anywhere else.”
The slideshow, titled I Miss You Denne, features the entire school staff expressing heartfelt sentiments for the students and hope for the future when they will all be back in the classroom learning together again.
“All staff in the entire building, and I mean everybody, contributed to the video, which just shows you how much we wanted to do this,” Brown said.
The slideshow took just more than a day to create with the software editor iMovie once staff had emailed their short videos and photographs.
Brown said he left it up to Denne’s staff to be creative about how they wanted to express the slideshow theme.
“And you can see in the video that everyone interpreted that differently, and brought a bit of themselves to what they contributed,” he said.
One teacher, for instance, holds up two signs with the following: What kind of joke can you tell while social distancing? Inside jokes!
The nearly seven-minute slideshow so far has almost 500 views on YouTube.
Denne Public School principal Kimberly Maybury last Friday sent an email to the school community that included a link to the slideshow, along with a note saying that the video would be a nice ending to the first week of online learning.
Within an hour of the slideshow going out, Maybury sent an email to all staff thanking them and letting them know that the response so far from the community has been overwhelming, said Brown.
“We have an online staff meeting every week, yesterday was the first since the slideshow, and the staff said they also loved the slideshow because it was an opportunity for us to see each other because we, too, haven’t seen each other for a month,” Brown added.
